Time Inc. Executive Vice President Sylvia Auton actively lobbied Time Warner CEO Jeffrey Bewkes to spin off the embattled magazine unit, saying it was hampered by being part of the media conglomerate.

The move, which Auton denies, was said to have come last November, at a conference in London for top executives from across Time Warner.

“Everyone was kind of dumbfounded by her behavior,” said one insider.

Sources said she pressed her point with a number of other executives besides Bewkes, who was puzzled as to why she, rather than Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore, was making the case.

Auton told Media Ink: “I have never approached Time Warner management to sell Time Inc., and would never do so. I believe that Time Inc. has a brilliant future as part of Time Warner.”

She has reportedly been stirring the pot on other fronts, as well.

John Huey, editor-in-chief of Time Inc., is said to have been so dismayed by her blurring the line between advertising and editorial that he pulled his name from the mastheads of all the magazines in Auton’s division.

The company insisted that Huey had no editorial input in the division after a 2008 realignment.

But others say that if that were true, his name would have evaporated in early 2009. It appeared in Real Simple, Southern Living and Cooking Light as recently as February, and was gone by March.

One insider said the trigger was a Real Simple advertising insert entitled “Decorating with Wal-Mart,” which seemed to mimic a preceding editorial section entitled, “Decorating with Yellow.”

Insiders say the insert ran afoul of guidelines issued by the American Society of Magazine Editors.

“I am afraid you have the wrong end of the stick,” Auton said via e-mail. “To ensure that all the Lifestyle publishers were up to speed with the latest ASME guidelines I did ensure that they had the latest rules.” She also said there was no feud between her and Huey. “I know it does not make good copy but I am actually a huge fan of his.”

ASME is reportedly planning to look into the issue after the National Magazine Awards.

Sore at Sorkin

Paul Krugman, the New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning economist, is at war with one of his colleagues, financial columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin.

Krugman says Sorkin twisted his words in a Times column yesterday, and huffed on a blog that Sorkin “owes several people an apology.”

Sorkin wrote that at the height of the financial crisis in 2008 and early 2009, there was debate about how to fix the financial system: “Some economists, including Nouriel Roubini of New York University and The Times’ own Paul Krugman, declared that we should follow the example of the Swedes by nationalizing the entire banking system.”

Countered an apo plectic Krugman on his blog, “I certainly never said anything like that, and I don’t think Nou riel did either.

“If you want to say that the advocates of nationalization were excessively pessimistic about the prospects for a light-touch bank strategy, fine,” he added. “But caricaturing their position, making it sound far more extreme than it actually was, is definitely not OK.”

Sorkin replied on his Times blog, Dealbook, citing two columns from Krugman. “Just so there is no confusion, I based that passage on what you and Mr. Roubini had said and written during the crisis about a Swedish-style nationalization of the banking system,” he insisted.

“I appreciate that you may have articulated the details of your views differently, or more specifically, in other columns and forums. And I appreciate that you could quibble with my words. But I do think it is clear that both you and Mr. Roubini had pressed for a Swedish-style nationalization. (By the way, at the time, I had thought the Swedish model was a pretty interesting approach, too.)”

Sorkin is no stranger to dust ups with his colleagues, some of whom last year accused him of cribbing their reporting for his best-selling book, “Too Big to Fail.”

BW blunder?

Bloomberg BusinessWeek plans to unveil its long awaited redesign, which it claims will “reinvent the business magazine,” with a party on April 22.

Unfortunately, BusinessWeek will be serving cocktails and hors d’oeuvres at Bloomberg headquarters the same night that the magazine industry is staging the National Magazine Awards at Jazz at Lincoln Center.

There is no chance that BW will be among the winners. The magazine, where Josh Tyrangiel recently replaced Steve Adler as editor-in-chief, is not a finalist in any category.

Still, competing with the National Magazine Awards for coverage is considered a blunder.

“Theoretically, you could still make both — you’d just have to leave theirs early,” said ASME CEO SidHolt.

No book break

Random House, the nation’s largest book publisher, shook up its ranks just a day after it celebrated winning Pulitzer Prizes at two of its imprints.

T. J. Stiles‘ “The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt,” published by Alfred A. Knopf, won for biography and David E. Hoffman‘s “The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dan gerous Legacy,” pub lished by Doubleday, won for general non-fic tion.

Yesterday, Gina Cen trello, president of Random Publishing Group, shook up her wing of the Random House empire by combining the Bantam Dell and Ballantine Books imprints into a new unit, Ballantine Bantam Dell. It will be headed by Libby McGuire, who was senior vice president/publisher of Ballantine. Bantam Dell Publisher Nita Taublib is exiting the company as a result.